Fermions in the vortex background on a sphere

Abstract

In 5+1 dimensions, we construct a vortex-like solution on a two-dimensional sphere. We study fermionic zero modes in the background of this solution and relate them to the replication of fermion families in the Standard Model. In particular, using a compactified space removes the need for the difficult localisation of gauge fields, while the present procedure (rather than naive compactification on a disk) also removes spurious fermionic modes.